Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Double Date with Judy and Debbi

Swing
with Scooter
20, the Summer 1969 Special, wasn't the only time DC reused story
material from A Date with Judy.

They had gone to that well in late 1968 for the first few issues
of
Date with Debbi.
Here, at least, they didn't redraw reprints; they bought new scripts
and art, but the scripts were rewrites of 1947-48 Judy
stories. Both A Date with Judy
1 and Date with
Debbi 1
open with a
letter to the reader from the main character, introducing the
characters pictured around the page
edges: parents, boyfriend, little
brother, rival, and Judy/Debbi..

The liberated woman story in Debbi
2 is the one that veers
the furthest from the original, but still, the writer
obviously saw
the emancipated woman Judy
story.

Alvin Schwartz was the first writer on A
Date with Judy, and
wrote her
stories cited here; Graham Place drew the originals. I can track one
writer on early Date with Debbi
stories without being able to put a
name to him or her; it doesn't seem to be any of the ones already known on
the strip: Henry Boltinoff, Steve Skeates, Barbara Friedlander, or John
Albano. Samm Schwartz was the first artist, but even by issue 2 the
powers that be decided that some Schwartz faces had to be reinked. By
issue 3 new artists began arriving.
DATE WITH DEBBI Stories with
A DATE WITH JUDY Plot
Sources

4 comments:

That's pretty amazing. Especially since they don't seem to be cherry-picking the best Judy stories from the whole run -- they just started from Judy #1 and went forward. I assume their original plan was to just keep on going until they ran out of Judy stories -- I wonder why they quit?